4/28/2011 @ 9:50PM1,193 views

Views On Political Reform And Leadership Splits In China

Some China watchers seem to be engaged in a Chinese variant of “Where is Waldo?” that we might call “ Where is China’s Gorbachev?” But unlike Waldo, whom you can find if you look hard enough, it seems unlikely a Chinese Gorbachev exists, at least anywhere near the top echelons of China’s leadership. While undoubtedly there are leadership splits over some issues, reports about thwarted reform efforts led by Wen Jiabao appear misguided.

Dr. Miller was my advisor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and I consider her to be among the foremost analysts of Chinese politics. Not everyone agrees, and a prominent, younger professor of Chinese politics recently dismissed the Fewsmith and Miller analyses to me as “old-school Kreminlology”.

From Fewsmith:

Whatever Wen Jiabao’s intention, his speech in Shenzhen resonated with those in China and abroad who hoped that political reform would be back on the government’s agenda, perhaps at the Fifth Plenum in October. Perhaps ironically, the response to Wen’s speech appears to have been driven by the increasingly dismal prospects for significant political reform as nationalistic voices find satisfaction with the “China model,” particularly in contrast to the economic problems of the West. This is a mood that finds little need to copy the West, particularly in political terms. In any event, it seems clear that political reform was never on the agenda of the Fifth Plenum, except in the broad sense that continued economic reform would inevitably require political changes, so much of the media discussion that took place in the six weeks following Wen’s remarks was simply disconnected from what was going on in China. Whatever Wen intended, and whatever the import of the “Zheng Qingyuan” articles, it is clear that China’s leadership has outlined a trajectory of modest inner-party democracy that in no way loosens the control of the Party, and there is no reason to think that this course will change in the immediate future.

From Miller:

…insistent remarks on the need for “democracy” by Wen Jiabao—in Shenzhen in August and again in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria while attending the United Nations session in New York City in September—have been read as contrasting starkly with tepid remarks by Hu Jintao on political reform (also made in Shenzhen), and so as indicating a fundamental split on the future of reform between the premier and the CCP’s top leader, and perhaps its broader Politburo leadership as well. Also, travels by internal security chief and Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang have been seen as indicating efforts of a conservative bloc in the party leadership from the security, military, and propaganda sectors to assert itself in PRC foreign policy, an interpretation that may aid in explaining the uneven but persistent evidence of hard-line trends in that arena over the past year and a half. Finally, the appointment of Xi Jinping to the post of vice chairman of the party Central Military Commission (CMC) at the 17th Central Committee’s Fifth Plenum in October, a year after the unexpected failure of the Fourth Plenum to do so, has been seen as the denouement of a prolonged and apparently failed attempt by party General Secretary Hu Jintao to derail Xi’s succession of him as China’s paramount leader in favor of Hu’s crony Vice Premier Li Keqiang.

These are the most plausible interpretations of the recent events described above, or at least the most plausible from among those interpretations that posit leadership conflict in explaining the events and their significance. In one case, however—that of Xi Jinping’s promotion to the CMC—available evidence is inconclusive. And in the other two cases, inferences of leadership conflict are not supported by available evidence…

These results do not demonstrate that conflict over power and policy does not exist in China’s leadership. This author believes on first principles—namely, that Chinese leaders are human and so as ambitious, competitive, and differing in outlook and policy preferences as politicians everywhere else—that leadership splits do indeed exist among China’s top leaders. In a context in which the interests of the various contending constituencies in China’s political order have multiplied and become increasingly complex as China’s wealth and power have grown, in which the stakes of leadership decisions have correspondingly increased, and as China’s leaders confront such episodic stresses as the world economic downturn since 2008, the potential for splits among China’s leaders can only have grown.

Nevertheless, China’s leadership under Hu Jintao has functioned as an oligarchic collective that appears to make decisions on the basis of consensus. The policy processes and rules by which the Hu leadership operates were implanted by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, effectively the restoration of an effort to establish collective leadership procedures in the mid-1950s that was derailed thereafter by Mao’s growing antagonism toward his veteran colleagues. The processes and rules evolved under Jiang Zemin’s leadership in the 1990s, and have taken stronger hold under Hu’s leadership in the past decade. They were implanted by Deng and his colleagues in part to inhibit a return to the intense free-for-all factional conflicts that characterized the last two decades of Mao Zedong’s leadership and in part to facilitate governance of a rapidly modernizing country. The necessity of such a collective leadership politics of consensus was reinforced as a lesson in 1989, when months of leadership splits over economic policy led to a paralysis among the leadership in its ability to deal with the demonstrations as they emerged in Tiananmen Square.

As a consequence, leadership differences over power and policy have since been fought out behind a rigorously sustained public façade of leadership unity and discipline. In that context, the notion that the party’s third-ranking leader, Wen Jiabao, would air personal preferences for “Western-style democracy” in opposition to the prevailing views of the rest of the Chinese leadership in an interview abroad with a foreign journalist ought to seem farfetched, given the highly negative precedent set by then party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang breaking party discipline in comparable fashion during the 1989 Tiananmen crisis. Similarly, the public intrusion of the party’s top internal security leader into foreign relations processes ought to invite a measure of skepticism in a context of two decades of leadership discipline in that arena.

The upshot is, therefore, that while splits certainly exist among China’s leaders today, they work themselves out in a significantly different political setting. And so the premises and methods used to identify them in the good old days of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath—when “left” was left and “sham left” was really “ultraright”—must evolve in step.

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I have always thought of Wen as the PBSC’s PR guy. He seems friendly and trustworthy, always the first to arrive on scene at disasters, and can be counted on to shed a few tears.

Whenever Wen drops these democracy bombs in the English language media, I imagine his fellow PBSC members have told him, “not that we really care what they think, but we need the barbarians to lay off us for a bit. Go out there and say things they like to hear.”

Even if Wen really believes the things he says to foreign media, he’s just one guy among many who have no intention of challenging the CCP’s power.

If the state-owned, Chinese language media aren’t very revealing in terms of what the senior leadership are really thinking, we should consider the English language media to be even further removed.

[The rest of the developing world is watching closely the China leadership model to see what they can learn from it (Let us now praise Hu Jintao [Jul 27], ). The two-party (or multi-party) adversarial Western system certainly will not work for them. In this system the opposing parties do their worst to demonize and destroy their rivals from within and from without. You can follow the current US presidential debates for a first-hand example. In a developing country, to lose can literally be fatal to the candidate and for his followers. What has never been raised in any discussion so far is the fate for the outgoing leader. Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin retired peacefully and on schedule, with honor and their legacy a base from which the successor builds on to progress further. More important, their families and supporters have been left unmolested after their leader departed. One must realize that the fate of the kith and kin of an outgoing leader is of paramount importance in the path to a smooth transition of power. China’s example shows that a leader need not cling to power until death or through a coup. And a leader’s political supporters and kin need not scramble for personal power bases or personal fortunes that can survive the demise of their leader. In the current Chinese system the mechanism for a smooth political transition makes possible to plan for rational leadership succession. This allows the search for the next national leader who will have popular support of the power elite as well as the support of those senior public service heads. This person can then be groomed and tested for the ultimate leadership position. To arrive to this exalted status of crown prince in waiting would have to have proven performance as a political functionary and in senior public service positions. This person will unlikely be able to acquire this record until at least into his mid-40s to early 50s. Another eight to 10 years of grooming in the Politburo and he’s 60, an age of wisdom, of benign temperament yet healthy enough for another 10 years to endure the rigors of office. Then he must retire. This age means he won’t have the physical strength to stay on even if he wants to. A leader’s function is to provide the stability and the continuity for each member of the leadership team to pool their talents and to function as a team for the governance of China. A practically guaranteed 10-year term under a designated leader gives enough time and stability to formulate, develop, implement programs and realize tangible results. Hu Jintao fits this profile. I don’t know if this is what Deng Xiaoping planned, but that was what he set up by example, not by law. His successors will find it very difficult to break those precedents. China has a government that is dynamic and works spectacularly. We have peace, stability and prosperity in the country. Why would anyone want to copy the chaotic political system of the West? Kelvin Mok (Jul 27, ’07)]

Since then I have come to develop a theory that China’s political system is gravitating back to the imperial system that has worked so well (the only continuous early civilization)for 2500 years that it is in the DNA of all Chinese. The modern major changes are to eliminate the weaknesses of the old imperial system yet retain the major corpus that worked. My post above addresses this.

The next major change is to elevate the status of the military that had been treated with disdain in neo-Confucian society. A country the size of China can never be free of military threats (long thesis required). Today China’s military will always have a member(s) in the politburo and China’s president, a non military person, will be the Chairman of the Central Military Commission. Thus the military is jointly and fully responsible for any national policy issued by the Politburo or the National People’s Congress. It cannot for example take the position of being misled or betrayed by the civilian government when it loses a war. It is subordinate to the CCP, a body of real persons, and not to some philosophical political ideology. It cannot be a rival for power over the civilian polity by claiming to be the true protector of the constitution.

In imperial China only the emperor was the ultimate authority. There was no military class, nobility or religious hierarchy to overrule the emperor. Thus today’s Chinese leadership will not tolerate rival organizations to its power. Forget about multiparty voting except at the lowest village and township level or general democracy.

When China’s leaders issue a new law or rule the denizens of a 2500 year-old civilization pretty much know intuitively what is required of them and what the punishments are. Its what custom dictated in the past. But don’t ask a Chinese to explain for to him there is nothing to explain. To foreigners the whole exercise is totally mysterious and we get cries of lack of transparency, deceit, unfair and so on. You see the disconnect? Mull on it.

In conclusion do make an attempt to think of China’s political development as a refinement of the well tested 2500 year-old imperial system. The government governs. The people live by their rules. (There is none of this fiction that the everyday man has the ability to govern in high office through an election.)If they misgovern they lose the mandate of Heaven and it will be legitimate to overthrow them. You will find that this concept useful to interpret China’s decision making process, its objectives and their outcome in Chinese society.